Trump Swears Fealty to Deep State During Pink "CoRev"

Saturday was supposed to be a day for Mr. Trump to mend fences with the intelligence community, with an appearance at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.

“I just want to let you know, I am so behind you,” Mr. Trump told more than 300 employees assembled in the lobby for his remarks.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia meddled in the United States election on his behalf. After the disclosure of a dossier with unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Trump, he accused the intelligence community of allowing the leak and wrote on Twitter, “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.

“I have a running war with the media,” Mr. Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”

“The reason you’re the No. 1 stop [CIA HQ in Langley] is, it is exactly the opposite,” Mr. Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”

That's from "With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift," by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Matthew Rosenberg. Much of the story is taken up with competing claims about the size of Trump's inaugural crowd versus Obama's (both 2009 and 2013). It is also being reported that "The women’s march in Washington was roughly three times the size of the audience at President Trump’s inauguration, crowd counting experts said Saturday." (See
"Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times More People Than Trump’s Inauguration," by Tim Wallace and Alice Parlapiano.)

I count no less than six stories in Sunday's New York Times devoted to yesterday's women's march. Turnout is estimated to have been approximately half a million in Washington D.C. and 400,000 in New York City. Not bad.

The women's march had its colorful symbol (a pink hat), and it had it's own Shepherd Fairey poster of a woman wearing Old Glory as a hijab:

In other words, the women's march had all the makings for a domestic color revolution: robust numbers of regular citizens, fetching symbols, a supple propaganda apparatus, all in opposition to a bloated billionaire megalomaniac. What was missing was a provocative act of violence, like the Maidan snipers or the pepper-spray storm that kicked off the Umbrella Revolution.

I don't think the intention here was to send Trump and Melania fleeing from the nation's capital. I think the goal was to put Trump on notice that if he doesn't kneel to the Deep State the color revolution machinery can be fired up again easily; and the next time, protesters likely will have plans for civil disobedience. That was the great failing of the huge protests in the run up to the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- leadership did not or could not ratchet up marches to mass civil disobedience. With Moral Mondays an established part of the bourgeois protest repertoire, I think it will be much easier now to mobilize mass civil disobedience if and when it is needed.

Despite Syrian Ceasefire Proposal, U.S. Still Insists "Assad Must Go"

Kerry is in Paris today (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Cease-Fire and Political Transition in Syria Crucial to Defeating ISIS, Kerry Says") talking up the ceasefire deal arrived at in Geneva. But the U.S. secretary of state has not ceased chanting the Saudi mantra of "Assad Must Go," and he persists in blaming the Syrian government for the rise of ISIS (some kind of chutzpah):

PARIS — The United States, France and Russia must step up their coordination in striking the Islamic State in Syria after the Paris terrorist attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday, but he insisted that cooperation cannot begin until there is a cease-fire and a political transition. 

Mr. Kerry expressed optimism that a shift in Syria could come within weeks now that the United States and more than a dozen other nations, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have agreed to a framework to end the crisis there. 

That will depend, he said, on the ability of Syrian opposition groups to organize and negotiate with the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and cooperation from Russia and Iran to ease the transition. 

“Now, all we need is the beginning of the political process, and the cease-fire goes in place – that’s a gigantic step,” he said in an interview with reporters who were traveling with him. 

Mr. Kerry also met with President François Hollande of France on Tuesday to discuss how to intensify pressure against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or the Arabic acronym Daesh. 

“If we can get that done, that opens up the aperture for a whole bunch of things,” Mr. Kerry said of a cease-fire in the four-year civil war. “So we’re weeks away, conceivably, from the possibility of a big transition for Syria.” 

The more quickly the political changes occur, he added, “the faster the violence can taper down and we can isolate Daesh and al Nusra, and begin to do what our strategy has always set out to do.” 

Although American and Russian forces are sharing limited information in their military campaigns, they are not fully coordinating their efforts against the Islamic State. France is also hitting Islamic State targets in Syria. 

United States officials fear that any information they shared with Moscow about American-supported opposition groups would be used by the Russians or Mr. Assad to target them.  [U.S. won't share intelligence on the groups it is backing because this would reveal that the West is backing jihadist groups very similar to ISIS; fighters move back and forth between the various Islamist factions based on who is paying top dollar.]

Once the political process is on track, Mr. Kerry said, the United States and Russia could begin to “cooperate on the broader scale, which we can’t do until we have some definition.” 

Mr. Kerry’s diplomatic effort faces long odds in the multisided conflict in Syria, which has become a proxy war, and it was not clear whether his ambitious timetable is feasible.
Although the United States has said Mr. Assad must leave office as part of any solution to the conflict in Syria, he has the support of Russia and Iran, and Iran’s deputy foreign minister reiterated that point on Monday. 

But Kerry said on Tuesday that it would be impossible to defeat the Islamic State without the departure of Mr. Assad. 

“He’s complicit in the rise of Daesh, and therefore, as long as Assad is there, you cannot fully go get rid of this phenomenon,” Mr. Kerry said.

In other words, nothing much has changed. Hope has been expressed that the impromptu Putin-Obama powwow at the G20 conference in Turkey might lead to increased coordination between Russia and the U.S. But as of yet we have no real proof of any rapprochement. There is some evidence that the French and Russians are working more closely. According to Foreign Policy's "Situation Report" this morning, French and Russian planes are both bombing Raqqa. This takes coordination I would imagine:

Amid new reports that Russian cruise missiles and long range bombers hit the Syrian city of Raqqa late Monday night, (there’s video of one of the missiles streaking across the Syrian sky), French warplanes also pounded the Islamic State’s capital for the second straight night, launching 10 fighter jets from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

So while the U.S. is parroting the line that ISIS (and therefore the terror attacks on Paris) is Assad's fault, there is some proof that France is beginning to gravitate to the Russian camp.

Yesterday's "Situation Report" contained an interesting synopsis of the spin on Paris:

Forty-nine Syrian rebel groups issued a joint statement on Friday condemning the attacks "that oppose the heavenly laws and the human values," according to a translation published by SITE Intel Group. The rebel groups asked the international community to align against the Assad regime, which it labeled the source of the Islamic State's persistence.

On the other side of the Syrian conflict, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani decried the Paris attack, with Putin urging France to join with Russia in forming an international coalition in Syria. Hezbollah, which is fighting in Syria alongside Russia and Iran on the side of the Assad regime, also issued a statement, referencing the recent attacks against a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut by the Islamic State.

The 49 Syrian rebel groups are chock full of Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom agree wholeheartedly with the Islamic State even if they quibble with the immediate tactics of kamikaze Kalashnikov attacks on rock concerts. These are the rebel groups the U.S. is aligned with, the ones it will be difficult for Kerry to airbrush come time for them to participate in a transition government.

After Paris: A Few Hopeful Signs but Overall Business as Usual

There are indications this morning that the Friday assault on Paris by Islamic State hit teams that murdered 129 might actually prompt a shift by the West. Ever since Mosul fell at the end of spring 2014, the West, led by the United States, has been engaged in largely cosmetic attacks on ISIS as the jihadist offshoot of Al Qaeda pursued goals identical to the West, namely, regime change in Iraq and Syria. The collapse of the Iraqi Army was used to oust Nouri al-Maliki, but Bashar al-Assad has not proven so easy to dislodge.

Beginning early last month with Russia's active militarily involvement against the potpourri of jihadist groups operating in Syria, many with the direct support of Western intelligence services and GCC funding, the war in Syria began to shift. Islamic State struck back by blowing up a Russian charter jet in the Sinai two weeks ago, followed by a suicide bombing in a Beirut neighborhood, capped off by the assault on Paris on Friday.

Indications that this ISIS assault on a Western capital city has elicited a move away from the cosmetic to the substantive in the war against the caliphate are contained in two stories this morning: "France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks," by Alissa Rubin and Anne Barnard, and "U.S. Warplanes Strike ISIS Oil Trucks in Syria," by Michael Gordon.

First, Michael Gordon's story. Many commentators have pointed out that if the U.S. were truly serious about knocking out the caliphate it would go after its black-market oil pipeline. As Pepe Escobar argued ten-days ago in "What's the Big Deal Between the Russians and the Saudis?":

Meanwhile, fomenting all sorts of wild speculation, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh still manages to collect as much as $50 million a month from selling crude from oilfields it controls across “Syraq”, according to the best Iraq-based estimates. 

The fact that this mini-oil caliphate is able to bring in equipment and technical experts from “abroad” to keep its energy sector running beggars belief. “Abroad” in this context means essentially Turkey – engineers plus equipment for extraction, refinement, transport and energy production. 

One of the reasons this is happening is that the US-led Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO) – which includes Saudi Arabia and Turkey – is actually bombing the Syrian state energy infrastructure, not the mini oil-Caliphate domains. So we have the proverbial “international actors” in the region de facto aiding ISIS/ISIL/Daesh to sell crude to smugglers for as low as $10 a barrel.

Or as John Newsinger points out in a footnote to his "Wars Past and Wars to Come" in the latest Monthly Review:

The U.S. fight against Islamic State is compromised by the covert support that America’s allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, continue to provide for that regime. When considering IS it is worth adopting the old adage of following the money. Who is helping produce, sell and distribute the Islamic State’s oil? It is certain that Western intelligence agencies know the answer to this question, but obviously those assisting IS are too important to be named, let alone be sanctioned for their actions.

Now, according to Gordon, the U.S. has finally decided to target the Islamic State's oil:

ISTANBUL — Intensifying pressure on the Islamic State, United States warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, American officials said.

According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.
The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey. 

Plans for the strike were developed well before the terrorist attacks in and around Paris on Friday, officials familiar with the operation said, part of a broader operation to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to generate revenue to support its military operations and govern its territory. 

American officials have long been frustrated by ability of ISIS to generate tens of million of dollars a month by producing and exporting oil.

To disrupt that source of revenue, American officials said last week that the United States had sharply stepped up its airstrikes against infrastructure that allows ISIS to pump oil in Syria. 

Until Monday, the United States had refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact. 

The new campaign is called Tidal Wave II. It is named after the World War II effort to counter Nazi Germany by striking Romania’s oil industry. Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September assumed command of the international coalition’s campaign in Iraq and Syria, suggested the name. 

To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message.

Don't believe the window-dressing about concern for civilian casualties. Just ask the survivors from the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. The U.S. and its allies obviously wanted to maintain the viability of the caliphate as a way to pressure the governments of Iraq and Syria.

My concern is that these airstrikes on the oil-tanker trucks are going to be a PR one-off, evidence of good faith for the voters back home who are paying attention. Kerry's statement coming out of the negotiations in Geneva stick to the "It's All Assad's Fault" script, which is the same one that got us ISIS to begin with. According to Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Attacks in Paris Add Urgency to Talks on Ending Syria War":

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov sparred openly over the fate of Mr. Assad, a central question in any final agreement. 

The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, believes Mr. Assad must go as part of any final settlement, and Mr. Kerry described him on Saturday as an enabler of the Islamic State and a “magnet” for foreign fighters who are spreading terror through the region and beyond. 

“This war won’t end — this war can’t end — as long as Bashar al-Assad is there,” he said. [Clear statement that there will be more terror attacks like Friday's in Paris.] 

But Russia has been a strong Assad supporter, and Mr. Lavrov argued that the conflict in Syria goes far beyond him, noting that past crises in Iraq and Libya only worsened with the ouster of their leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi. 

“I cannot agree, therefore, with the logic that Assad is the cause for everything,” Mr. Lavrov said to Mr. Kerry, seated with him in a hotel ballroom for the news conference. “The Paris attacks have shown, alongside with ISIS claiming responsibility for it, that it doesn’t matter if you are for Assad or against him; ISIS is your enemy, so it’s not about Assad.” 

Also left unresolved was the critical question of which groups would be considered terrorist organizations and which legitimate members of the opposition would be included in the political transition talks, an issue that the diplomats agreed to work on in the days ahead.

Not good. Yet in the Rubin and Barnard story about French airstrikes on the caliphate's capital of Raqqa, there is some hopeful news that the West is finally getting serious:

There is a growing focus on both reducing the Islamic State’s territory and its financing, said French government officials and experts. 

“We need to push the organization away from its territories,” said Jean Charles Brisard, a terrorism expert, who worked in the French government and now is the chairman for the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research group. 

“Most of its resources are from the territory, so we have to push it away from its resources in Syria and Iraq and that means going in on the ground with a regional power,” he said.

The United States currently has soldiers on the ground in Iraq working with Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to dislodge the Islamic State. France has not yet said whether it will adopt a similar course. 

On Sunday, Mr. Hollande met his predecessor and rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, at the Élysée Palace. Afterward, Mr. Sarkozy urged decisive action against the Islamic State — a position Mr. Hollande has also taken. 

“We need everybody in order to exterminate Daesh,” Mr. Sarkozy told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

We'll see. A danger here is this "going in on the ground with a regional power" could be the green light that Erdogan has been looking for all along -- a buffer zone in northern Syria. Erdogan is going to get his billions and his special session in Brussels for Turkey. He has been playing his cards like a poker shark.

So despite hints here and there of a shift, it looks like business as usual. It is going to take a shift in Europe away from the United States and closer to Russia and China to bring about real change. That is not going to happen unless there is a cracking of the European Union. Something that "business as usual" is rapidly bringing about. Look for Marine Le Pen in 2017.

Xi Jinping Does the Emerald City

Before his powwow with lame duck Obama tomorrow in Washington D.C., Chinese president Xi Jinping is in the Emerald City for a couple of days. Xi arrived at Paine Field in Everett to the welcome of flower-bearing children of a Boeing worker. The big event yesterday, an early dinner at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle, was attended by politicos and corporate giants. This is from a story in the Seattle Times by Janet Tu, "In Seattle, Chinese leader vows to join U.S. to fight cybercrime":

The banquet was more than a venue for Xi’s speech: It demonstrated the array of U.S. business and political luminaries with ties to China. 

The head table alone included Bill and Melinda Gates, Gov. Jay Inslee, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the chief executives of Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks — not to mention the CEOs of IBM, DuPont and Ford, three other U.S. governors and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.

Jane Perlez, chief diplomatic correspondent in China for the New York Times, describes the logic of Xi's Seattle visit ("Xi Jinping Pledges to Work With U.S. to Stop Cybercrimes") succinctly and accurately:

The Chinese worked hard to front-load Mr. Xi’s trip — his first to the United States as president — with two days of events in Seattle intended to show an upbeat relationship with American business. And in a broad sense it has worked as a show of force to President Obama about the power that China wields, and how much American companies need China even if its policies do not align with Washington’s.

As close as I got to experiencing the Chinese president's visit was the racket made by a helicopter that hovered over downtown in the vicinity of the Westin. When I went out for a post-work four-mile run to absorb the evening sunshine on the last day of summer I felt like Ray Liotta's character at the end of Goodfellas with the helicopter constantly perched over his shoulder.

To get the official position on China one must read today's piece by USG propagandist David Sanger, "Conflict Flavors Obama’s Meeting With Chinese Leader." Writing with Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Sanger pitches the official line like this: The good, decent government officials of the United States thought that when Xi came to power they would have a reasonable interlocutor with whom they could collaborate. Instead they found themselves confronted by a zealous, power-hungry nationalist bent on confrontation wherever he could find it. That's the official line basically. It can be found towards the end of the story:

“This is not the U.S.-China relationship that senior Obama officials expected,” either at the start of Mr. Obama’s tenure in 2009 or the beginning of Mr. Xi’s in 2013, said Michael J. Green, an Asia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. “The assumptions that many people had, that cooperation on transnational threats like climate change would ameliorate problems in geopolitical arenas, was wrong.”

In her speech on Monday, Ms. Rice [National Security Advisor Susan Rice] made it clear the United States and China would showcase their cooperation on climate change, with a deal on carrying out a broad emissions accord they struck last year during a meeting in Beijing. There will also be agreement on a code of conduct to reduce the risk of accidents between American and Chinese aircraft, and steps to expand educational exchanges between the two countries.

But on the areas of sharpest disagreement, such as human rights, the South China Sea and cyberattacks, there is still a wide gulf, and for weeks the White House has been debating how to handle them.

The South China Sea issue erupted last week in the Senate Armed Services Committee when Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, pressed David Shear, the top Pentagon official in charge of Asia and the Pacific, to declare when the last time was that the United States sent ships or aircraft closer than 12 nautical miles to the newly reclaimed reefs.

Twelve miles is the usual limit for “territorial waters,” so the operation would show that the United States did not consider this to be Beijing’s sovereign land. Reluctantly, Mr. Shear said the last time was in 2012, before Mr. Xi took office.

“The United States of America will sail, fly and operate anywhere that international law permits,” Ms. Rice said during her speech, repeating the administration’s policy on the matter. But one official said Secretary of State John Kerry and his deputies, along with several intelligence officials, did not see the value in forcing the Chinese to react. Others disagree.

“They’re cultivating strategic ambiguity,” Patrick M. Cronin, the director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said of the Chinese. “What we need, though, is more clarity about our interests. We have to do more to reinforce rules of the road that are against coercion or force, and against this Chinese buildup.” 

Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said policy makers never anticipated this degree of trouble from Mr. Xi, either on maritime issues or on human rights, a prime area of concern after the Chinese president moved to crack down on dissidents and lawyers and took aim at civil society groups. 

Representatives of an array of those groups met with Ms. Rice at the White House on Tuesday to discuss concerns about China’s proposed legislation to tighten controls on foreign nongovernmental organizations, and senior officials said the topic would be a focus of the meetings between the two presidents. 

“Originally, there was reason for optimism about the speed of change in China” under Mr. Xi, said Mr. Cardin, one of a group of lawmakers set to meet with the Chinese president on Capitol Hill on Friday. “And now there’s sort of disappointment.”

What goes unmentioned in all of this is anything that the United States has done. Since Xi's ascent to the presidency, Obama has staged a coup in Ukraine, launched a new Cold War against Russia, cracked the Middle East apart with its regime-change operation in Syria, and lectured Hong Kong on how to handle the Umbrella Movement protests, not to mention the militarized "pivot to Asia."

The United States under the Peace Prize POTUS has been a rogue elephant on the world stage, blundering and marauding, destroying societies willy-nilly. Now even the European Union shows signs of cracking under the strain.

Chomsky's recent talk at the New School, where he deconstructs right-wing opposition to the Iranian nuclear deal, is illuminating with regards to the U.S. position towards China. Rogue powers do not allow nations to possess a deterrent:

Obama Switches Up the ISIS Narrative

An interesting item that emerged from the G7 summit in Krün was Obama's statement about the important role of foreign fighters in the offensive capabilities of Islamic State. According to Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear, "Ukraine Crisis and Advance of ISIS Dominate Agenda for Group of 7":

At a news conference Monday after the close of the summit meeting, Mr. Obama acknowledged a need to accelerate the training of Iraqi military forces to counter the advance of Islamic State militants, and he said that he had asked the Pentagon for a plan to do that.

“We don’t have, yet, a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of Iraqis as well,” Mr. Obama said. “The details are not worked out.” 

Mr. Obama said of the militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS: “They’re nimble and they’re aggressive and they’re opportunistic.” 

He acknowledged that the training of Iraqi forces “has not been happening as fast as it needs to.” And he said the United States has “made some progress, but not enough” in stemming the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria. 

Mr. Obama said that “thousands” of new fighters were replenishing the ranks of the Islamic State faster than the coalition could remove them from the fight. 

“If we can cut off some of that foreign fighter flow, then we are able to isolate and wear out ISIL forces that are already there,” Mr. Obama said. “Because we are taking a lot of them off the battlefield, but if they’re being replenished, then it doesn’t solve the problem over the long term.”

The president also said that Turkey was not doing what was required to monitor its border with Syria and halt the stream of fighters. 

Earlier on Monday, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, where he reaffirmed the world powers’ commitment to supporting Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State, which has made major gains in recent weeks. 

“Although it is going to take time, and there will be setbacks and lessons learned, we are going to be successful,” Mr. Obama said at the start of his meeting with Mr. Abadi. “ISIL is going to be driven out of Iraq, and ultimately, it is going to be defeated.”

This represents an about-face by the U.S. president. From the outset, ISIS has been defined by USG/Western media as an indigenous, Anbar-based response to the predatory overreach of Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The Cracker Jacks version of the story goes something like this: Because al-Maliki refused to pay the Sunni Sons of Iraq, as was promised, Al Qaeda in Iraq rose from its ashes in Anbar, using the war next door in Syria as a proving ground, and reconstituted itself as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The United States spread this story last year as a way to successfully force out al-Maliki as prime minister. Now the story changes. It is really the flow of foreign fighters via the border with Turkey that makes Islamic State so lethal and not because it is an Anbar-based popular guerrilla movement.

This puts Obama more in line with the fact-based reporting of, say, a Patrick Cockburn writing for The Independent whose interviews with Sunnis who have fled Anbar establish convincingly that ISIS is foreign-led, i.e., Chechens, Saudis, Libyans, et al.

I haven't seen anything in the mainstream press drawing attention to this latest Obama somersault, though there has been a reaction to Obama's statement that "We don't have, yet, a complete strategy . . . ." For instance, Shreeya Sinha in "Obama’s Evolution on ISIS" has a helpful compendium of Obama's twists and turns, beginning with "ISIS is a J.V. squad of takfiris," or something along those lines, to the latest on June 8, "We don't have a complete strategy."

All the evasions, false starts and missteps can be attributed to the fact that Obama has to obscure the obvious -- ISIS is a creation of U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, the same allies the U.S. has been working with to funnel fighters into Syria. In the war against ISIS, the United States is battling an enemy that it worked to create. Naturally this kind of disingenuousness -- saying you are fighting the takfiris while aiding the takfiris -- is going to result in policy confusion.

The plan floated this morning (Michael Gordon, "U.S. Embracing a New Approach on Battling ISIS in Iraq") is that the U.S. is going to occupy Al Taqqadum, a base outside the Anbar town of Habbaniya, and use it as a training hub for the recapture of Ramadi:

To assemble a force to retake Ramadi, the number of Iraqi tribal fighters in Anbar who are trained and equipped is expected to increase to as many as 10,000 from about 5,500. 

More than 3,000 new Iraqi soldiers are to be recruited to fill the ranks of the Seventh Iraqi Army division in Anbar and the Eighth Iraqi Army division, which is in Habbaniyah, where the Iraqi military operations center for the province is also based. 

But to the frustration of critics like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who say that the United States is losing the initiative to the Islamic State, the Obama administration has yet to approve the use of American spotters on the battlefield to call in airstrikes in and around Ramadi. Nor has it approved the use of Apache helicopter gunships to help Iraqi troops retake the city.

It was the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army that disintegrated in Mosul last year at this time. One wonders how this training mission will be any different. And where is any mention of the Shiite militias currently in Anbar, the Popular Mobilization Committees?

My sense is that this is all part of the U.S. shadow dance. The U.S. is putatively at war with ISIS, but it is really at war with its Sunni allies, who are at war with Iran; at the same time, the U.S. is also at war with Iran. Everything is topsy-turvy. To keep Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait and Qatar from ratcheting up support for the takfiri fighters, the U.S. must re-station troops in the region.

That's what we're looking at here. The GCC wants the U.S. military footprint back on the ground. Absent that, more war.

Japan's Re-Militarization: Obama to Make Comfort Women of Us All

At work I have a little cubicle. I wish I were there more often. The way my position has developed I backup or assist, or so it seems, just about everyone in an office of approximately 20 people. So I am constantly, depending on who is out sick or on vacation -- really, even if everyone shows up to work -- bouncing from one desk to another. It is stressful. Arriving at someone else's desk you have to determine where everything is and then what work needs to be expedited; you have to be familiar with another person's process.

At this job, and at the job, where I worked as a dispatcher, at the union local prior to this one, I likened myself to a "comfort woman." The union members would come in to "fire off their guns" and I would absorb the salvos.

So I always felt some sort of solidarity with the old Korean women trying to hold Japan accountable for its Imperial past. During World War Two Japan established a brothel system of sexual slavery in territory it had conquered. As Japan, under prime minister Shinzo Abe, moves to shed itself of its pacifist constitution, Abe has been reluctant to express contrition to the comfort women.

This week Abe has come to the United States on a state visit, the first by a Japanese leader in nine years, in order to confer with the White House on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and the re-militarization of Japanese society as part of Obama's "pivot to Asia."

Last night there was a state dinner. Some organizations had been demanding that Abe acknowledge the comfort women and apologize to them. According to the account in this morning's paper by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "No Deal, but Progress on Trans-Pacific Trade, Obama and Shinzo Abe Say After Meeting," Abe sidestepped the issue:

If Mr. Abe’s visit carried powerful historic significance and the promise of closer ties with the United States, it was also plagued by longstanding controversy. Korean-Americans and several members of Congress pressed him to use the occasion to make an official apology for the use of so-called comfort women in wartime military brothels. 

Mr. Abe did not offer one.

“I am deeply pained to think about the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering as a result of victimization due to human trafficking,” Mr. Abe said in response to a question about whether he would apologize. “This is a feeling that I share equally with my predecessors.” 

He said he stood behind previous government apologies for the issue, and noted that Japan had provided $12 million last year for international efforts to eliminate sexual violence during conflicts and would provide $22 million more this year. 

That fell far short of the personal apology activists have sought. 

In a statement, Korean American Civic Empowerment, a nonprofit group, called Mr. Abe’s words “gravely offensive to the victims of the Japanese comfort women system.” 

The group called the previous apologies to which Mr. Abe referred “not clear” and “not acceptable to the victims,” and said it was enraged by the prime minister’s mention of how much money he has devoted to the issue. 

“The comfort women survivors are only asking sincere acknowledgment and apology, not money,” the statement said.

What is important to note, and what is not part of the reporting in the mainstream press about Abe's scrapping Japan's pacifism, is that it is being done at the behest of the United States. How else to interpret Monday's story by Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Gordon, "Japan and U.S. Set New Rules for Military Cooperation"?

On the eve of a formal state visit by Mr. Abe to the White House, American and Japanese officials announced an agreement on Monday that would expand the reach of Japan’s military — now limited to its own defense — allowing it to act when the United States or countries American forces are defending are threatened. 

The agreement reflects worries about North Korea and, especially, China, whose territorial claims in the South China Sea and growing military spending have upset its neighbors. 

“With China’s growing assertiveness and North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Japan, like a lot of allies, wants to be there for us so we’ll be there for them,” said Michael J. Green, the senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It allows the U.S. military to plan Japan in, so that when we turn to them and say, ‘Can you deal with our left flank?,’ the Japanese, in principle, now can do that.”

***

The military agreement announced on Monday replaces guidelines geared exclusively toward the defense of Japan with new rules that eliminate any geographic restriction. 

Now Japanese forces also could aid American ships involved in missile-defense activities in the region, or Japan could intercept a missile heading for the United States. “That is a very big change from being locally focused to being globally focused,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said at a joint news conference in New York with Secretary of State John Kerry and their Japanese counterparts. 

Sheila A. Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations called the deal a “very significant transformation” between the United States and Japan. “It’s about deterrence and de-escalation, to guard against the risk that something small could quickly become a major armed conflict.”

As Ukraine readies itself for another failed offensive against Novorossiya, it is important to remember that the New Cold War encompasses not just Russia by the Chinese Dragon as well. Just as the U.S. is fanning the flames of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, it is relaunching Japanese militarism -- all under the watch of the Nobel Peace Prize winning POTUS. Surely, for those of us who thought for a moment that Obama might actually be a candidate of "Hope and Change," he has made comfort women of us all.

#Black Lives Matter Movement Has Legs, Runs Past Power Elite

Yesterday I sensed a shift. I don't know if it is entirely subjective on my part. I'm tired of the massive police presence downtown. Every night I get off the train I'm greeted by milling pockets of law enforcement -- from the sheriff's department to the city police, with a robust helping of transit security. 

Last night there had to be a dozen bicycle cops from the sheriff's department clogging the platform of the transit center. I banged my left leg, tender from a hamstring pull while out on a run Sunday morning, on the front wheel of one of their trail bikes. I apologized. The cop said nothing.

There is a new surliness. When I got topside out of the station there where so many police at the entryway I brushed chests with one of them. He could pick up my vibe, which was not happy and welcoming.

As I walked east, passing more pockets of law enforcement, I could see or hear no evidence of protest that could possibly justify such a display of force. And in the end that is what we are dealing with here -- a naked display of force.

During Occupy which from what I can tell put a lot more protesters on the street than the last couple weeks of the #Black Lives Matter intifada, there was nowhere near the amount of police. During Occupy, there was usually a bunch of bicycle cops, but that was mostly it.

So what has changed? Why suddenly is all the machinery of the American police state visible?

I think if has something to do with the "flash mob"nature of these "die-ins" that are targeting gigantic corporate retailers. It is holiday season, a time when the corporate behemoths make most of their sales; so mayors are being pressured to mobilize the gendarmes to guard the gates of the citadels of consumption. In comparison, Occupy, with its myriad centrally-located encampments in cities coast to coast, seems old fashioned; easily policed at least. There would often be marches that would originate at the Occupy encampments, spreading out from there. But, once again, these could be easily policed.

The #Black Lives Matter Movement is much more disposed than Occupy to put bodies on the gears -- to shut down highways and mass transit and commercial holiday hubs. Call it today's equivalent of the Deep South Woolworth lunch counter of the Jim Crow era.

To her credit, so far the Gray Lady has been on board the #Black Lives Matter Movement. But yesterday, when news of the Berkeley weekend protests was topping Google News, nothing could be found on the New York Times web site. I didn't spend a lot of time searching. But usually when there is breaking news of importance the Gray Lady pushes it to the top of her home page. Nothing. Then this morning the story by Carol Pogash and Barbara Grady, "Berkeley Protesters Block Freeway Over Garner and Brown Killings," is a tepid rehash of some of the standard rhetorical devices meant to diminish a protest movement: 1) play up property damage, 2) accentuate division among the protesters and 3) never tarry too long on police violence. For example, note the following from the Pogash and Grady article:

On Saturday night, demonstrators had clashed with the police, who used tear gas on the crowds, drawing criticism for tactics seen as heavy-handed. On Sunday night, the police held back while some people set garbage fires and smashed windows at Wells Fargo, Chase, Citibank and other buildings, primarily ones occupied by big corporate tenants. The vast majority of shops along Shattuck Avenue, the main shopping district, were left untouched. 

“It’s ironic that the place with probably the strongest supporters is being trashed,” said Tom Bates, Berkeley’s longtime mayor, said in a telephone interview. “What we have are a lot of people who are outside agitators who want to disrupt and cause violence with the police.” 

Mr. Bates said he was “totally devastated and disappointed” that “what could have been peaceful deteriorated into people attacking the police and doing damage.”

If you have ever been involved in protests, you can read between the lines and piece together what really happened in Berkeley over the weekend. The police went apeshit on Saturday and attacked protesters, the overwhelming majority of whom were orderly, with volley after volley of tear gas. This pissed people off and brought more into the streets the next night at which time the police let the Black-Bloc types trash some corporate storefronts. Vandalism then becomes the primary focus for the media, not police tactics; hence, the quotes from Berkeley mayor Bates denouncing "outside agitators," that old chestnut, for causing the violence with the police.

Imagine if that had been the focus of the Gray Lady's Hong Kong team of Chris Buckley and Alan Wong. Chief executive Leung Chun-ying would have been given prominent placement to dismiss the Umbrella Movement protesters as outside agitators. Instead the Gray Lady focused her attention overwhelming on the police use of tear gas to clear protesters from Hong Kong government buildings, an incident that originated the Umbrella Movement to begin with (umbrellas to protect protesters from pepper spray and the sun).

So based on this report of the weekend protests in Berkeley it appears that the Gray Lady might be trimming back her advocacy of #Black Lives Matter. The protests are getting too broad and showing signs of continued life. Obama's diffident pronouncements regarding the edicts of the Mike Brown and Eric Garner grand juries are eroding his support among his last solid constituency, blacks. As Julia Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear note in "Unrest Over Race Is Testing Obama’s Legacy,"

At this point, Mr. Obama’s response to Ferguson, Staten Island and the unrest across the country has diminished his image with important groups, according to new polling figures. Half the respondents in a Pew Research Center survey conducted Wednesday to Sunday disapproved of the president’s handling of race relations, compared with 40 percent who approved — a reversal from August, when 48 percent approved and 42 percent disapproved. While the majority of African-Americans still said the president had handled race relations well, support among them had dropped 16 points since polling in the summer.

Charles Blow had a generally positive view of the #Black Lives Matter Movement in a column yesterday, "A New Age of Activism: From Eric Garner and Michael Brown to the Ballot Box," but he misses the mark when he directs the protesters to move to the voting booth:

Indeed some activists have already moved beyond chants for “change” and begun to develop sophisticated answers to the retort, “change what?”. The trick is to redirect the passions before they dissipate, to maintain momentum when the media attention fades, and to amplify raised voices with votes cast. 

I believe — because the optimist in me must — that votes will soon, somehow, follow the passion, that people will come to see marching not as a substitute for voting but a supplement to it, that more people will work to effect change inside the system as well as outside it.

Blow should know that Obama's presidency itself is all the proof people need to know that voting does not deliver change. More is needed. Direct action must proceed the election of captive politicians. The #Black Lives Matter Movement knows this.

Ferguson Protests + Afghan Government in Trouble + Oil Price War

Obama holds a PR event today (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Obama Plans Meetings on Ferguson Unrest at the White House") the goal of which is to put a lid on the public outrage over the police killing last August of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

[Obama] will gather his cabinet on Monday to discuss the results of a review of federal programs that provide military-style equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies. The initiatives were called into question in August, after the Ferguson police responded with riot gear and assault-style weapons to protests in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown, the teenager, by Officer Darren Wilson.

“As the country has witnessed, disintegration of trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve can destabilize communities, undermine the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, undermine public safety, create resentment in local communities, and make the job of delivering police services less safe and more difficult,” a White House official said Sunday night, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the meetings.

Don't count on any significant changes in the federal policy of offloading surplus military hardware to local constabularies.

The faux-macho, Fortune 500 thinking prevalent in our "Land of the Free/Home of the Brave" encapsulated in spouted lines like "Money talks; bullshit walks" is actually a helpful guide here. As long as the protesters stay mobilized in significant numbers the state will have to take special measures to fund the deployment of the highway patrol and national guard. According to Jack Healy and Monica Davey, "Darren Wilson, Officer in Ferguson Shooting, Resigns From Police Dept.":

The peaceful daytime demonstrations came as Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri sent state lawmakers a letter outlining what he called an urgent need to cover the ballooning costs of maintaining hundreds of National Guard troops and state police officers who are deployed here on the streets, day and night. The governor has called a special legislative session.

One Ferguson resident interviewed last month prior to the grand jury decision thought some sort of indictment had to be forthcoming because a spike in protests that would follow an acquittal would bankrupt the community. Unfortunately, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch was not so prescient.

At this point I think the protests have legs. There was encouraging evidence of crossover between anti-racist and economic justice activists in the form of coordinated Black Friday protests.

Many significant shifts are currently underway. In Afghanistan the unconstitutional power-sharing agreement between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah is near collapse. A helpful summary of recent events is found in this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report by David Francis and Sabine Muscat:

Kabul is the focus of Taliban insurgents seeking to undermine the fledgling government of new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. The Afghan capital has been under siege in recent days with a dozen attacks in the last two weeks. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed the attacks were intended to scare foreigners out of the capital as well as to undermine Ghani. They follow the ratification of a bilateral security agreement between Kabul and Washington that will allow for 10,000 American troops to stay in the country in 2015. 

The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Hodge and Habib Khan Totakhil: "The past two weeks have seen a string of attacks on diplomatic and international targets in Kabul, including a deadly assault Saturday on a guest house belonging to a nongovernmental organization, Partnership in Academics and Development. This past Thursday a suicide attack hit Wazir Akbar Khan, the heart of the diplomatic quarter, and a car bombing struck a British diplomatic convoy." More here. 

The attacks, which targeted both Afghan officials and foreigners, have already forced the resignation of Kabul's Chief of Police Gen. Zahir Zahir. Ghani is scheduled to travel to London and Brussels this week to rally global support for his country. But political fallout in Kabul has already begun. 

Ghani has been unable to form a new government amid escalating violence and has dismissed most of the existing ministers in Afghanistan's government. The New York Times' Joseph Goldstein: "The underlying problem, which various factions in the government point to, is the power-sharing agreement that followed this year's disputed presidential election. It makes Mr. Ghani president and his election rival, Abdullah Abdullah, the chief executive. Since the deal was struck in September, Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah have been unable to agree on a new cabinet, leaving the government in the lurch and raising questions about the long-term chances of the power-sharing deal." More here. 

Optimism had grown in recent weeks that Ghani and Abdullah would be able to find a way to work together. Their original agreement allowed the United States to finalize the bilateral security pact. Now, with the fate of Ghani's government uncertain, there are sure to be questions from Washington about whether the pact will hold.

My only quibble with the way Francis and Muscat frame the upswing in Taliban attacks is that they make it seem as if it directly followed Ghani's signing the bilateral security agreement as soon as he took office in September. I think the recent spate of attacks in Kabul come after reports in November that Ghani had lifted Karzai's ban on U.S.-led nighttime raids and airstrikes.

A developing story that has global ramifications not just for the power elite but for every single one of us who consume is the present oil-price war underway. OPEC met last week and decided against any production limits (Stanley Reed, "OPEC Holds Production Unchanged; Prices Fall"). This dropped the price of barrel of oil down around $70.

There is plenty of speculation as to why the Saudis, whose fiscal breakeven is reported to be around $90 a barrel, are opposed to production quotas and willing to let the price drop to $60 level. Some say it is to kill off the U.S. shale oil boom in Texas and North Dakota; some say it is to punish Iran and Russia. Whatever it is I think it is pretty safe to say the Saudis are practicing some form of predatory pricing; they want to maintain market share above all else because that is where their power comes from.

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith has a helpful post this morning: "OPEC Fires First Shot In Global Oil Price War."

To get a sense of the type of new energy frontier we are in, check out last week's story by Diane Cardwell, "Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels":

According to a study by the investment banking firm Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as 1.4 cents. In comparison, natural gas comes at 6.1 cents a kilowatt-hour on the low end and coal at 6.6 cents. Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents. 

“It is really quite notable, when compared to where we were just five years ago, to see the decline in the cost of these technologies,” said Jonathan Mir, a managing director at Lazard, which has been comparing the economics of power generation technologies since 2008. 

Mr. Mir noted there were hidden costs that needed to be taken into account for both renewable energy and fossil fuels. Solar and wind farms, for example, produce power intermittently — when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — and that requires utilities to have power available on call from other sources that can respond to fluctuations in demand. Alternately, conventional power sources produce pollution, like carbon emissions, which face increasing restrictions and costs. 

But in a straight comparison of the costs of generating power, Mr. Mir said that the amount solar and wind developers needed to earn from each kilowatt-hour they sell from new projects was often “essentially competitive with what would otherwise be had from newly constructed conventional generation.”

The Saudis and the Koch brothers will do everything they can to maintain their fossil-fueled hegemony.And at this point it is becoming apparent that it is going to be a very destructive effort.

Why Aren't Turkey, al-Saud and Qatar on the Office of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions List?

One of the interesting juxtapositions raised by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday is how the United States seeks help to combat violent jihadis in Iraq and Syria, a force it helped to create, at the same time it subjects Iran to withering financial and trade sanctions. Somini Sengupta has the story, "Iran’s President Says West’s ‘Blunders’ Aided Rise of Islamic State":

UNITED NATIONS — President Hassan Rouhani of Iran delivered a searing indictment of Western and Arab states on Thursday in his annual speech to the United Nations, blaming them for sowing the seeds of extremism in the Middle East with “strategic blunders” that have given rise to the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. 

“Certain intelligence agencies have put blades in the hands of madmen, who now spare no one,” Mr. Rouhani said, adding that “all those who have played a role in founding and supporting these terror groups must acknowledge their errors” and apologize. 

He also used the occasion to denounce the Western-led sanctions imposed on Iran’s nuclear program and reiterated his government’s desire to resolve Iran’s protracted dispute with the United States and other nations over the program. 

He implied that the nuclear negotiations were linked to Iran’s cooperation in combating the Islamic State and its affiliates, saying that no security cooperation was possible until the sanctions were lifted. 

“The people of Iran, who have been subjected to pressures especially in the last three years as a result of continued sanctions, cannot place trust in any security cooperation between their government with those who have imposed sanctions and created obstacles in the way of satisfying even their primary needs, such as food and medicine,” he said.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis had a small story, "Treasury Imposes Terrorism Sanctions," in yesterday's paper about the U.S. Depart of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designating numerous individuals and a few organizations tied to Islamic State and Nusra, as well as Indonesian jihadis, to be added to its sanctions list.

Hirschfeld Davis constructs her brief piece by culling Treasury's press release, but she one-ups USG by dutifully trotting out at the top of her story the canard that Islamic State is difficult to sanction because its revenue stream is all illicit, principally its sale of black-market oil:

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions on 11 people and one entity it said were sending financial and other support to terrorist groups, including the Islamic State. The sanctions are aimed at the funding streams that have allowed the terrorist organizations to flourish and recruit fighters from the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. 

The impact of the sanctions is unclear, particularly since the Islamic State largely circumvents the international banking system and traditional commerce, deriving much of its wealth from black-market oil sales, extortion and kidnappings for ransom. But the action is also designed to publicly expose key players in the group, with the goal of isolating them and restricting their access to money and freedom of movement.

Prior to Islamic State's attack on the Kurds in August when the the group was racking up victory after substantial victory on the ground in Syria and Iraq and the United States was doing its best to ignore the jihadi blitz, the canard was floated that IS was self-funding based on its control of oilfields in northern Syria and an extensive system of extortion in Mosul and elsewhere. This canard was necessary in order to steer blame away from sponsors among U.S. allies in the Gulf as well as the U.S. covert programs in Jordan and Turkey to unseat the Syrian government.

But as Kemal Okuyan, a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Turkey, made clear in a post yesterday on the Counterpunch web site ("The Master's Plan: ISIS, the U.S. and Turkey: Are They All Crazy?"), without money and weapons from the Arab monarchies ISIS could not survive:

Let’s us dig in the issue of ISIS a little more. Among the countries who have joined the U.S. led coalition against ISIS, aren’t there some that still finance ISIS? Yes, there are. In case Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan were to stop the flow of money and arms to ISIS, it would not take more than a week for the whole business to be over. However, other than a few symbolic measures, nothing substantial has been done on that front. In other words, the reactionary coalition keeps feeding the organization that they have declared as the “enemy”. Who would believe you after this?

Yesterday the United States, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates bombed refineries in the northeastern Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasakah. Helene Cooper and Anne Barnard in "Warplanes Blast Militants’ Refineries in Syria, Targeting a Source of Cash," point out today the Pentagon's wildly inflated estimates of the value of ISIS's oil revenue:

Officials with the United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said the refineries produced 300 to 500 barrels of oil daily, generating as much as $2 million per day in black-market oil sales for the group’s operations. That estimate is higher than American officials had previously made public, and would put the price around $333 per barrel. Oil sells for about $100 a barrel on the open market.

Why do this? Why inflate the value of crudely refined jihadi black-market oil to three-times the market worth? The obvious answer is the one provided by the Okuyan: So that the reactionary coalition can keep feeding the jihadis that they are bombing, making the problem bigger and the war larger.

Why not add the nations publicly acknowledged to finance and provision Islamic State to the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list? Cuba, Iran and Syria (along with Russia under the heading "Ukraine-related") are on the list -- and these nations do not attack the U.S. Why not Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- and Turkey, for that matter -- the nations behind Islamic State?